Three Colours White, the second part of Krzysztof Kieslowski's trilogy based on the colours of the French flag and upon the precepts of liberty, freedom and equality, is the easiest of the three films to negotiate but by no means the least in weight. It's the kind of comedy only a hopeful pessimist could have made and, if that sounds like a contradiction in terms, you don't know Kieslowski very well.

The film specialises as much in a kind of ironic gallows humour as in laughter pure and simple, but bitterness is also avoided - which is a small miracle in itself considering the subject matter and the setting.

Its central character is a Polish version of the eternal little man, in this case a mild-mannered hairdresser (Zbigniew Zamachowski) whose work to establish himself in Paris is rudely aborted by his French wife (Julie Delpy) suing him for the non-consummation of their recent marriage. Divorce is inevitable after a stuttering court appearance and, with his credit cards invalidated, the hairdresser resorts to begging in the Metro.

There, he meets another Pole who is apparently even worse off. He is willing to pay someone to officiate at a depressed friend's own suicide, and will do a considerable favour to anyone acceding to his request. The promise is undertaken.

Helping him to get back to Poland in a trunk by checking it in as his own luggage, his new friend now admits he's the one who wanted to die and then recovers his will to live after being conveniently shot by a blank. Finally, he partners the hairdres ser in a shady land deal which sends one on the way to richness and makes the other his admiring henchman.

Still obsessive about his wife, but now in a position of equality with her which he had never achieved in France, our hero finally thinks up a suitable plan to hook his delicate fish. He buys a corpse (Russian, of course) and has it buried as himself, leaving his money to his wife, who now arrives in Poland to collect. But love, though it conquers most things, isn't as easy to achieve as money.

The film, like most of Kieslowski's which deal with Poles and Poland, is less headily stylish than Blue or Red, made in France and Switzerland respectively. But it feels somehow truer, as if the director instinctively knows how his characters should react and can thus afford a more direct, less elliptical approach. And it contains not only a superbly self-effacing but apt performance from Zamachowski, first as the damaged exile and then as the conquering entrepreneur at home, but also a strikingly deft portrait of post-communist Poland, where the most baleful kind of capitalism reigns and it's every dirty dog for himself.

The combination of these two signal virtues rather outweighs Kieslowski 's other preoccupations, even if it doesn't drown them out. The hairdresser's struggle towards equality is essentially the same as the fight of the composer's wife in Blue to find her personal freedom.

But, unlike either Blue or Red, White can't be accused of portentousness and it may well wear better in retrospect. It's almost perfect as far as it goes - a bleak but ultimately hopeful comedy which, if it hadn't got to be called White, might very well be dubbed Black.

Kieslowski 's comedy, like the other two works in the trilogy, has a lot to say about the psyche of Europe now, just as the Decalogue spoke so eloquently of Poland's a few years ago.